In Le Havre, wastrel siblings Michel (Saury) and Catherine Mougins (Demongeot) have run the family shipping business into the ground since the death of their magnate father. A friend of Michel’s suggests to him, as if it were a new idea, the old shipping-insurance scam: fill one of the company’s ships with a cargo of sawdust in the guise of expensive Ceylon tea, scupper the ship, blame an old WWII mine for the sinking, and claim a huge sum from the insurance company. The shipping firm owns a suitable hulk, the Volturnia, now docked in Hamburg.

Jürgens and Demongeot, plotting mischief.

Catherine ropes in her much older lover Éric Muller (Jürgens), a retired sea captain trying to make it big in business, and in turn he ropes in his Hamburg pal Mathias (Sorano), a specialist in criminal bombings. Together Éric and Mathias plant a time bomb in the bowels of the vessel; before going ashore, Mathias announces that nothing can now stop the bomb going off at 3am.

The ship sets sail for the planned detonation area, the vicinity of an old minefield (so as to make the “accident” seem plausible), with Éric as skipper, and needless to say there are problems. They lose several hours because of a blocked lock outside Hamburg; despite the objections of chief engineer Julien Aubriant (Gobin), an old friend of Éric’s, that the old ship’s boilers might blow, Éric insists on keeping full steam ahead in order to try to catch up for lost time. When an emergency signal is picked up from a fishing boat that has caught fire, Éric refuses to detour to offer assistance—overruling an appalled First Mate Laurent (Loyer). The fact that his bizarre actions are going to look pretty fishy after the “accident” seems not to occur to Éric; even beforehand, they’re becoming too much for Laurent.

Meanwhile, ashore, Michel has spent a chunk of the proceeds in advance on a natty little Mercedes sportscar, while Catherine is beginning to crumble under the pressure: “We’ve all become monsters! We’re monsters!” she wails in a moment of pungent overacting.

“We’ve all become monsters!”

And then, not long before the bomb is due to go off, the Volturnia‘s starboard boiler blows. It’s at this point that the interest really picks up, as the crew struggle to free a stoker—the giant Yugoslav nicknamed Chewing-gum (Hahn)—who’s been trapped by falling debris; unfortunately, the movie’s some 70 minutes old by this time. Thereafter, it’s as if the makers ran out of money, because most of the remaining significant deeds—including, not least, the disarming and disposal of the bomb!—are performed offscreen, and we’re left in the dark as to how they were achieved. All in all, it’s not really surprising that this movie’s as obscure as it is.

The purpose of Noirish is to act as an extension to the Encyclopedia -- an annex, if you like -- where I can add entries for movies that for one reason or another didn't make it into the printed book.

In some instances, this is just because the movie concerned was released too late for inclusion.

Most often, though, the reason was logistic. Although the Encyclopedia takes the broadest possible view of film noir, there were some movies that were either too obscure or too tangential to the theme to merit the use of precious page space: 800+ large-format pages -- nearly 700,000 words -- may seem a lot but, when you're trying to cover in excess of 3,000 movies, you soon learn to appreciate the constraints.

That's why this enterprise has the title it has: Noirish. Many of the movies here are very borderline noir, and some aren't noir at all but have associational interest.

Just because a movie's obscure doesn't mean it's lousy . . . although there'll be some lousy movies covered here. There'll also be plenty of movies that are, shall we say, undistinguished -- which is not to say they're without at least some points of interest, and certainly isn't to say they're not lots of fun to watch.

After posting a bunch of entries to get myself started, I'll be adding new movies to Noirish as and when I watch them.

Frisk the Suspect

Vitals

The abbreviation vt stands for variant title.

Movie titles given in UPPER CASE refer to entries in A Comprehensive Encyclopedia of Film Noir.

Perp’s Profile

John Grant, a Scot by birth but a long-term inmate of New Jersey, is the author of some sixty books. His nonfiction has included The Encyclopedia of Walt Disney’s Animated Characters, Masters of Animation, three pocket books on cinema (Animated Movies, Sci-Fi Movies, and Noir Movies), The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (with John Clute), and a series of books on the misuse and misunderstanding of science, begun with Discarded Science and continued most recently with Denying Science; for his writings on popular science he has been described by Gregory Frost as “the living heir to Martin Gardner.”

His fiction has included novels like The World, The Far-Enough Window, The Dragons of Manhattan, The City in These Pages, and The Lonely Hunter, as well as numerous short stories, some of which have been collected as Take No Prisoners.

For his nonfiction work he has received the Hugo Award (twice), the World Fantasy Award, and various other international awards and nominations. His editorial work, in particular his time running the celebrated fantasy art book imprint Paper Tiger, has brought him a Chesley Award and a World Fantasy Award nomination.